Business Park Landscape
Animation projected onto the outside wall of the Halifax Army Navy Store.
This collaborative project includes animations based off of paintings. The painting is a collaged business park landscape mashup with an exaggerated sunset shining down on top of it. The artist is interested in the peripheral landscapes of North America, and the recurring businesses that inhabit them - parking lots, box stores, gas stations, drive-throughs, and highway infrastructure. The painting portrays a colourful and busy landscape and presents a dark realism, revisiting the Canadian landscape tradition in terms not of natural but of commercial space, where ubiquitous retail outlets dictate use of the land and proclaim its occupation. The crowded composition maps out a “Geography of Nowhere,” a term coined by the author James Howard Kunstler in his 1993 book by the same name exploring the effects of sprawl, civil planning, and the automobile on American society. The addition of animating the painting transforms it into a busy and dynamic representation rich with movement in intricate details.
